Viskovatoff - Foundations of Niklas Luhmann's Theory of Social Systems [Philosoph

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go on synthesizing new viruses while carrying on operations that normally are part of its autopoiesis, such as using energy from its stored reserves and maintaining its membrane. Thus, despite being so radically modified, the cell’s autopoiesis (if that is still the correct word) continues, and the cell dies not because some fine balance between its various reactions has been disturbed but because it has simply used up all its resources to produce virus particles or because it is so full of those particles that it bursts.

That a phenomenon as ubiquitous as the virus so clearly contradicts a fundamental assertion of the theory of autopoietic systems— that they are autonomous in the sense that they do not pick up and process “verbatim” information they encounter in their environment— leads one to suspect that other criteria than simply explanatory power lie behind the authors’ enthusiasm for the concept of autopoiesis. And indeed, one does find liberal-humanistic and ecological values being voiced both by the authors and their commentators, with warnings being given against overvaluation of the general or the species at the cost of the individual, using the theory of autopoiesis to “ground” them (Maturana and Varela 1987, 244-50). One may thus speculate that one reason that led the authors to leave out a fundamental aspect of life—its program-based nature—was their inclination to absolutize the concept of autonomy because of their ethical beliefs.9

Luhmann took Maturana and Varela’s vision of how a cell works as his prototype for how to conceptualize social systems. In the same way that molecules produce other molecules in a circular process, communications produce communications. The ability to abstract from the individual that this provides allows him to make descriptions of modern society that are compelling to a degree matched by few if any other theories. And yet one has doubts. It may make at least as much sense to say that communications made by a group of individuals interacting are produced by the group itself, taken as an emergent entity, as it does to say that they are produced by the individuals themselves, but does the same hold for meaning itself? Also, as Schimank (1985) has argued, it is doubtful whether the theory can explain societal differentiation (a primary concern of Luhmann’s social theory, as opposed to his theory of social systems) or whether it can explain social change in general, for that matter (Schmid 1987). Yes, society often changes gradually, so that it is hard to see any particular individuals as producing the changes intentionally, but might not individuals sometimes have an effect? And if so, should not a theory with universal intent be able to deal with that? Might there not be a

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component missing at the fundamental level of description from Luhmann’s theory—a component that not merely declares that systems produce themselves but actually explains how social autopoiesis takes place—that isolates mechanisms analogous to the mechanisms of gene transcription and protein synthesis of the cell? Rather than trying to answer these questions directly at this point, let us first sketch out a view of scientific method that can lead to the development of such a foundational theoretical component.

3.SYSTEM THEORY AND EMPIRICAL SCIENCE

Luhmann’s project is, most fundamentally, to limn the social (Luhmann 1982, ix). In undertaking such a task, he departs from a positivist view of how science works—by patiently accumulating knowledge through empirical investigation as opposed to actively constructing a theoretical framework that can tie all this knowledge together. Instead, he adopts the view often voiced by natural scientists that obtaining the right concepts is necessary before significant progress can be made, following the stipulation of Talcott Parsons that choosing the right “primary abstractions” is of fundamental importance (Ackerman and Parsons 1966, 24-25). His project is also guided by two other views of how scientific research should be carried out. One is that one should aim for general theories (Luhmann 1995, xlvii; 1984, 9). The other is his often-voiced observation that science tends to look for successively smaller “fundamental entities” (Luhmann 1990a, 329). Accordingly, the way he has carried out his project is by starting off from the most “general” theory possible, system theory, and then “respecifying” this theory to conform to the social domain as defined by what its fundamental constituent entities are—namely, communications.

I agree with Luhmann on the overarching importance of conceptual work but believe that he has misconstrued the way in which science achieves generality and overestimated the general applicability of the heuristic to look for ever more elementary entities. While it is indeed true that generality of theories is desirable in science and that the way to achieve this is often through abstraction, one can distinguish two different ways of achieving generality. System theory takes one way, while the individual empirical sciences—and science as a whole—take the other. System theory departs from a very abstract characterization of its object domain—complex-unified entities

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consisting of simpler parts—and asks what of a general nature can be said about such entities without paying attention to the specific qualities of these unities and parts but only to the relations between them. Empirical science, on the other hand, does pay attention to specific qualities of the entities with which it deals, and the way it does so is by looking at different kinds of entities separately. Thus, physicists study physical systems while biologists study biological ones. Despite this compartmentalization of the sciences, science ultimately does achieve an all-encompassing unity by making connections between the various disciplines: biology links up with chemistry, chemistry with physics, and so on, but without everything being “reduced” to physics since “higher-level” disciplines can point out regularities that are not apparent at and cannot even be described on the physical level (Oppenheim and Putnam 1958). It is not too hard to determine the “separation of labor” between the empirical sciences and more abstract disciplines such as system theory. Only the former can provide valid and complete scientific explanations. This is because science ideally aims to extend explanations as far as possible down the links of a chain of causes, producing a given event or phenomenon (Railton 1981). If one goes far enough down such a chain, one will have to deal with the specific qualities of the entities involved, rather than the relations between entities with which system theory deals. In addition, the empirical sciences can import any insights or discoveries from system theory into themselves, so it cannot be the case that there are phenomena that only system theory can explain. One thus sees that the role of system theory is rather like that of mathematics: by working in a purely conjectural abstract realm, it is left free to explore conceptual models without concern for their immediate applicability and may thus come across ideas that would not otherwise have been found that may be of explanatory value in the empirical sciences.

The role of system theory is hence to look for analogies across disciplinary boundaries in case such analogies lead to models that can be of use in particular empirical sciences. Accordingly, it makes no more sense to say, as Luhmann (1995, 12; 1984, 30) does, that “there are systems” without specifying what kind of systems—chemical, biological, or whatever—than it does to say that “there are Euclidean planes”: both concepts are abstractions with no empirical referent. Failure to understand this point can lead to the construction of a harmful ontology and to what one might call a “metaphysical” mode of thinking. Now, there is nothing wrong with constructing

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ontologies. As we know, for example, from Quine (1969), science makes ontological decisions all the time when it tells us, for instance, that water exists. The way it comes to this conclusion, however, is by considering a multitude of empirical information in relation to a network of theory that is able to account for that information. To say that water exists is on one level merely shorthand for a whole range of empirical data, and once one says it, to make the “ontological jump” and take the statement at face value is merely to incorporate it into the commonsense point of view that there really is something out there. For the aforementioned reason that system theory, because of its abstractness, does not make well-defined links with empirical data, one is not entitled to make the same ontological decision with respect to “systems in general.” The unfortunate consequence of supposing that one can is to start thinking that by remaining within system theory, one can really explain anything. This is what Maturana and Varela do. Unfortunately, this is also what Luhmann ends up doing: even though he “respecifies” system theory to deal with social systems, he does not do so in a way that enables him to deal with concrete social systems but remains immersed in the ontological/explanatory structure of the theory of autopoietic systems. Thus, in order for the theory of social systems to be an adequate scientific theory (and that means an empirical and explanatory theory), it must be able not only to describe the social domain by saying that it consists of communications but also to explain (or at least point to an explanation) how communications come about. All that it is able to do, however, is to refer to the definition of autopoietic systems, which is that they produce themselves by producing their elements. Thus, communications are produced because it is in the “nature” of social systems to produce them. As we have seen, the theory of autopoietic systems is not able to explain how biological cells produce their elements, and there is no reason to think that it would be able to do so in the case of social systems. It is hard to see how one would explain the production of communications, other than by considering the brain and/or mental processes of individual actors.10

The view of empirical science I have just sketched leads me to propose an approach to carrying out Luhmann’s project alternative to Luhmann’s own. Instead of assuming at the outset of one’s process of theory construction both that the right theoretical framework (autopoietic systems theory) and the right determination of the “essence” of the social have been selected, in such a way that one is precluded from incorporating into one’s framework the large portion of

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potentially useful theories that are not compatible with these selections, proceed as follows.11 Start from the body, taken as a whole, of scientific theory that does not deal with the social and then see what additional theoretical categories and explanatory strategies one must add to it if one is to adequately explain the social.12 Thus, since it is commonly accepted that the higher one goes up the hierarchy of “levels of emergence” from the physical to the biological to the social, the less reliable one’s knowledge becomes, one may take as given biology and especially evolutionary biology (but not, of course, on a naively reductionist understanding), take with a grain of salt theory from cognitive science—but be ready to incorporate portions of it if they appear to account in an efficient way for wide ranges of social phenomena— and only then see what else one needs if one is to be able to account adequately for social phenomena. And in taking the last step, as we noted at the outset, let us take Luhmann’s theory as our starting point and try to change it as little as possible. This means, among other things, that we follow Luhmann in adopting the social system as a fundamental category of social theory. But we do so not by supposing that “there exist systems” that can be adequately understood by means of the self-contained theory of autopoietic systems but by being willing to exploit the analogies that exist between organized collections of individuals and other kinds of systems, such as cells.

It can be seen that this way of going about, what Parsons (1997) called “building social systems theory,” has certain correspondences with Luhmann’s way of thinking about it. Luhmann often remarks that in doing social theory, one should take the normal as improbable, for instance, when asking how social order is possible (Luhmann 1981, 195-285). This can be taken as a distancing strategy, a way of getting one to stop taking the social for granted and to look at it from the outside. Our program of seeing what one needs to add to the natural sciences to deal with social phenomena, while trying to keep the third-person view of the natural sciences, serves the same purpose. Also, we have already noted that Luhmann remarks that he follows the practice of the natural sciences of seeking out ever-smaller constituent elements. We take that practice to be merely a consequence of the basic aim of science to aim for unification (Friedman 1981; Kitcher 1981). The further one can extend explanations, the more unified science becomes. Therefore, if one can explain the behavior of some particles by doing so in terms of the smaller particles constituting them, one should do so. Looking at it thus in terms of the goal of explanatory unification, as opposed to drawing general conclusions from what

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that leads to in practice in certain cases, leads one, however, to a different evaluation of the role of “elementary entity” played by communications in Luhmann’s theory. Communications do indeed appear to be elementary constituents of social systems (whether they are the only ones is another matter), but this does not mean that one can stop the analysis there: the goal of explanatory unification still impels one to ask how they come about, and if to answer this one has to go down to the level of individual actors, one is forced to do so, if not to stay there forever, then at least to show how the connection can be made.

4.ACTOR THEORY

In the same way that biological processes are able to occur because of the chemical properties of the molecules that make up organisms, social processes are enabled by the properties of human beings. Therefore, it would seem that for a full and deep understanding of social phenomena, consideration of the characteristics of human beings is unavoidable. From a purely natural science point of view, what the properties of human beings are that allow them to engage in complex behaviors is rather clear: it is the possession of a highly complex nervous system in which all but one ten-thousandth of the neurons are devoted not to registering environmental stimuli or producing motor responses, but rather to detecting patterns of correlations between these stimuli and responses and the outcomes of the latter and making use of these patterns to produce flexible and successful behavior (Maturana and Varela 1987, 159). One can describe this nervous system completely in terms of the objective, third-person language of physical science. Now, what is interesting insofar as the cognitive and social sciences are concerned is that human beings produce patterns of behavior that cannot be captured in this third-person language. For instance, if one observes people going into a bookstore, one sees those people who leave taking rectangular objects from the store engage in a certain kind of behavior before they do so: some give slips of paper to someone standing across a counter, others hand her a plastic card and push some buttons, and still others sign a piece of paper. What is interesting about this is that there is nothing common to these three types of behavior that can be described in physical terms. Rather, to see what the three have in common, it is necessary to switch to a different, intentional level of analysis and to say that they

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are all different ways of what one calls making a purchase. To understand what the latter means, one needs to have at one’s disposal concepts such as the beliefs and desires a person has. As many philosophers have shown, working with such concepts brings one into a completely different world of enquiry than that of the natural sciences since a given statement about a person’s beliefs or desires may be definitely true or false, although there is in principle no way of objectively determining if either is the case: one has no choice but to interpret the person’s actions, communicative and otherwise, with the goal of determining the truth value of the statement (Taylor 1985; Searle 1992; Dennett 1987).

Except to someone with an extreme behaviorist orientation, the fact that one can observe fairly stable patterns of intentional behavior leads one to conclude that when studying human behavior, it is legitimate and indeed unavoidable to use a level of analysis additional to the one that deals with (objective) physical phenomena: the semantic level that comprises people’s (subjective) beliefs and desires.13 In mapping out the basic “architecture” of our theoretical framework, therefore, we posit such a level, which is equivalent to Luhmann’s category of meaning. However, unlike Luhmann, we see no reason why the acceptance of one level must mean the rejection of another. This is because while we agree with him that theory should strive for generality, we take the implication of this differently than he does since, as noted, we take as our starting point the body of natural science as opposed to a closed, self-contained theory. Therefore, to us generality means not only the ability to describe all phenomena within the language of one’s theory but also the ability to incorporate possibly valid explanations, wherever they may come from. It may be that, despite the intentional nature of human behavior, certain patterns of behavior are best explained at the physical level. (This is most likely in cases where natural selection would have, in behavioral domains having a high influence on reproductive success, “hardwired” a predisposition to particular kinds of behavior [Symons 1987].) Furthermore, if one wants to give a complete explanation of any given behavior, even one stated in intentional terms, it is ultimately necessary to go down to the physical, neural level since it is the latter that gives rise to intentionality. Accordingly, in addition to the semantic, we also posit a second, physical level of analysis.14

The question now arises whether we should leave it at these two levels. I believe that we should not and that an additional set of regularities should be taken into account before one proceeds with

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actually constructing social theory. If one considers the whole range of human behavior, one finds some regularities that are clearly not the consequence of biological processes but also are hard to put into the framework of intentionality, which involves people’s usually conscious beliefs and desires and also individual volition. The preeminent example of this is language. Clearly, we have little choice about the properties of the language we use, taking it essentially as “external nature,” and the way we come to acquire a language (as children anyway) also is not conscious or volitional. These facts alone make it unsuitable for placement at the intentional level. But it also has a more “formal” property that makes it unsuitable for that. As opposed to “semantic objects” such as meanings or novels, language has a syntactic nature that makes it amenable to a relatively non-open-ended description by means of a relatively small number of rules. Thus, the way a language “enters into us” is different from the way, say, a novel does: while each of us reads and remembers a novel through the lens of our particular personality and experiences, one suspects that a language, as a grammar and a set of dictionary definitions, acts in each person from the same language community in essentially the same way—as an equivalent habitual conformance to the same set of rules.15 One can find other patterns of behavior that are analogous to language: gestures such as handshakes that have a received meaning, expressions used as greetings or farewells, and simple rules of conduct such as that one does not take something from stores without paying for it. Something characteristic of all the examples but the last is the ability of these patterns of behavior to change in a gradual way analogous to biological evolution, as the consequence of numerous individual human actions of varying degrees of volition. The simple, easily decomposable nature of these behaviors seems to be the reason for this: a pattern of behavior can change by one component of its “program” being substituted by another from somewhere else, in the way that genes are recombined upon the sexual reproduction of an organism, or the spellings of words change (Dawkins 1976, chap. 11).

This quality of rules, that they appear to have an existence apart from the intentions of the actors who follow them and to be capable of evolution on their own in a mechanical manner apart from their interpretation by actors—analogously to genes—suggests that rules have what we may call a syntactic aspect apart from their semantic aspect that makes it appropriate to accord to them their own level of analysis in our framework.16 This is not to say that rules are followed blindly by actors and never interpreted by the latter. What it does mean,

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however, is that rules can be and often are followed without reflection, either out of habit—simply because doing so has worked in the past—or out of simple time pressure. In such cases, it is as reasonable to attribute the actions that are entailed by rules as much or even more to the rules themselves as to the actor following them, and this is a second reason to locate rules outside of the semantic (intentional) domain, into what we are calling the syntactic level. Yet a third reason to accord rules an autonomous ontological status with respect to actors and intentionality, and probably the most important, is the following. As has been argued by Pettit (1993) and Haugeland (1998), among others, rules underlie human rationality and hence intentionality itself. Unless I am able to take certain rules, for the moment anyway, as given—such as the rule that “ ‘pencil’ is used to refer to pen- cils”—I will be able to get neither the processes of reasoning nor of communication off the ground. It thus appears that underlying our intentionality, and thus making semantics possible, is a constantly evolving set of rules, the vast majority of which at any given time we follow mechanically and without reflection. It is worth noting that many and probably most of these rules are shared by the members of a community. Such rules that are followed by more than one per- son—whether it be by the members of a society, an organization, a family, or a “subculture”—we may call cultural rules.17 To say that people can “share” rules is not to say that one can actually find in each person’s brain the same sentence-like structure. It is merely an efficient way of describing a regularity that does not fit easily into either of the two levels we have mentioned and one that we believe can be theoretically productive.18 Thus, in addition to the physical and semantic levels, we postulate a middle syntactic one.19 The combined description of human beings at these three levels I shall call actor theory (Viskovatoff 1998).

5. A REFORMULATION OF THE CONCEPT OF SOCIAL SYSTEM

Before proceeding any further, it will be useful to recall one of the basic problems Luhmann was trying to solve and the means he chose for solving it. This was how to conceptualize social phenomena as in some sense autonomous from individual actors—and thus how to describe these phenomena as an emergent entity occurring at a “higher level” than that of individual minds and hence not requiring

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a direct reference to the latter in these descriptions. The way he did so was by adopting the theory of autopoietic systems to make an analogy between individual minds (psychic systems) and social systems and to argue that in the same way that minds are “constituted” by thoughts, social systems are constituted by communications. To make the autonomy of social systems from psychic systems complete, Luhmann adopted the unusual position that meaning, the “medium” of both thoughts and communications, is in no way more intrinsic to minds than it is to social systems by developing a phenomenological definition of meaning.

Now, if one looks more closely at Luhmann’s account of social systems, one finds that they do not in fact consist solely of communications. They also have a structural component in the form of expectation structures that, unlike communications, subsist through time.20 A possible reason why the concept of expectations, despite “its central theoretical position” (Luhmann 1995, 292; 1984, 397), is not mentioned in most cursory descriptions of social systems by Luhmann and others is that the systems described by the theory of autopoietic systems have no structures: there are only the systems themselves, their elements, and the circular organization by means of which the systems produce themselves by producing their elements (which is a major flaw in Maturana and Varela’s theory, as discussed in section 2). In any case, since communications (like thoughts) are “temporal” elements of fleeting duration, by introducing the concept of expectations, which refer to such temporal elements but by their very nature must themselves subsist through time, Luhmann is able to give his systems “enduring” structures despite his initial characterization of social systems as being systems that consist of elements that are communications precluding this.21 In what follows, the reader must hence bear in mind that social systems consist not merely of communications but also of expectation structures, even though that is not how Luhmann’s theory is usually presented.

It is interesting to ask just what kinds of entities these expectation structures are. Following the previous section, it is natural to consider them to be collections of rules. A couple of examples will help to motivate this. According to Luhmann’s social theory, modern societies are differentiated into functional subsystems, each of which has its own specialized “communications medium” that determines the way it interacts with its environment. Thus, the legal system is specialized for processing information in terms of the distinction legal/illegal, and the economy is specialized for doing so in terms of the distinction